


twenty questions

by Shaedan



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 23:23:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20218003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shaedan/pseuds/Shaedan
Summary: “Twenty Questions is a spoken parlour game which encourages deductive reasoning and—” SAM recites.“I know what it is, SAM,” she says. It comes out fonder than she expected it to.or, sara has a late night working. SAM keeps her company.





	twenty questions

**Author's Note:**

> please play this game i promise it's good.

Outside the windows, the Heleus cluster is nothing but a smear of stars against all-consuming black. The lights changed to yellow-tinged… a _ number _of hours ago; Sara decides she doesn’t care how many.

Just another late night working. Lots to do now, with a settlement of sorts in the works. That’s what she tells herself it is, anyway. And what she says goes—she is the Pathfinder, after all. The title’s got to be good for something.

She signs the report with a flourish, sending it off into the void of the Tempest’s digital storage, where it will languish until they pass close enough by a transmitter for it to zip off towards the Nexus. The vidcall on Havarl’s surface had been a luxury, piggybacking on the angara’s infrastructure out of the goodness of Kiiran Dals’ heart. The rest of the endless question-answering, negotiating, and brainstorming involved in making this collaboration work is being done by email, and the Initiative’s own, snail-slow system.

It’s tedious, nothing but pointless formalities and saying the same things over and over to the same people over in Colonial Affairs. Busywork. But Sara likes busywork. It’s good for staying busy. And staying busy is good for…

Well. When you can’t sleep. Or having a late night working. Same thing.

But. Now it’s done. And she still doesn’t think she could fall asleep.

Sara leans back in her chair. It creaks. To her left, SAM’s avatar spills blue light over the desk; it’s almost as if he’s keeping tabs on her. Keeping her company. It’s just a feeling, not anything real, but still.

“I would recommend resting,” SAM says, volume adjusted for the late hour.

She stretches. Every bone in her body screams for sleep, but she doesn't think she could manage it with a gun to her head. Well. It might be difficult to sleep with a gun to your head in general. “I know.”

Sara puts away the data pad and sighs, staring at the desk without really seeing it. It’s a blur of colour anyway, with how messy it is. She can’t be bothered to clean it up. Instead, she pushes a loose piece of paper around. Round and round. It rasps against the tabletop.

“Ever heard of a game called twenty questions?” she asks.

“Twenty Questions is a spoken parlour game which encourages deductive reasoning and—” SAM recites.

“I know what it is, SAM,” she says. It comes out fonder than she expected it to.

“Of course, Pathfinder.”

Something freezes solid inside her. Sara squeezes her eyes shut. “Please don’t call me that. I’m just… I’m Sara. That’s my name.”

“Protocol dictates—”

He keeps talking, but she talks louder. “I don’t care. You know it’s my name, you’ve called me by it before, for most of the time we’ve known each other, actually, so just. Keep doing that. Besides, it’s just the two of us here. It’s not like anyone’s going to hear.”

It’s quiet for a moment.

“Yes, Sara.”

She puts her feet up on the desk and crosses her ankles, resting her hands on her stomach. “That is how you say it, yeah. Well done.”

“That was sarcasm,” SAM remarks.

“Ahoy, captain obvious.” Sara picks up the piece of paper from the desk and contemplates tearing it into a thousand tiny little pieces. She decides it’s not worth the mess. “At this point, you really should be better at figuring that out. I think about what eighty percent of what I say is sarcastic.”

“Eighty-four.”

“That,” Sara says, lifting her head to glance at his router, “was a joke, and I am very impressed.”

SAM’s avatar flickers and flits in its strange patterns. “Thank you.”

“Anyway. Twenty Questions.” Sara clears her throat. She hadn’t noticed the real smile creeping up on her face. “You go first.”

SAM is silent for a moment. It’s more for her benefit than his, Sara suspects; he really is getting better at this whole social thing.

“Go ahead.”

“Okay…” Sara tips her head back on the headrest. “Could I hold it in my hand?”

“No.”

“Is it an object?”

“No.”

She taps her foot against the air. “Is it a… concept?”

“No.”

“Well, damn. An action?”

“Yes.”

She sits up straight. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” she says. “Could _ I _ do it?”

“Yes.”

“Am I doing it?”

“No.”

Sara is quiet for a solid minute. Then she says, very softly, “SAM, is it sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“God, I wish you had a face I could punch,” she groans, sliding down in the chair until she’s not sitting in it so much as awkwardly draped over the seat. “I have been given a passive-aggressive robot nanny at the age of twenty-two. Fantastic.”

“Your health will deteriorate if you do not get adequate rest, Sara,” SAM says, and just the fact that he uses her name for goddamn once makes her less inclined towards murder.

By way of reply, she makes a grunting noise.

SAM’s avatar flits on the desk. The patterns are different every time. Sara has given up trying to link them to any sort of meaning. “You are physically exhausted.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I apologise, but I do not understand the reasoning behind your actions.” If he were human, Sara wouldn’t blame him for feeling testy. As it is, through the monotone, he just seems… confused.

“Well maybe I’m not using much reason. Ever think of that?” She lets herself slip the last bit down on the floor. It’s cold, even through her clothes.

Honestly, he can take it. It’s just a taste of his own medicine; lord knows Sara likes unanswered questions—mostly because they’re a lot like busywork—but even she is starting to feel some frustration. If they’re equally inscrutable to each other, then that’s fair. A level playing field.

Except it’s not a game, and definitely not a competition—or if it is, they’re on the same team. They’re as much on the same team as anyone could ever be.

So, “Here’s an idea,” she says. “You can ask me twenty questions, about _ me _. Anything you don’t understand. I’ll… do my best to explain. I can’t promise I’ll make sense a hundred percent of the time, but…”

He barely gives her enough time to finish speaking. “Why will you not sleep?”

Sara sighs. “Because,” she says, “I hate it. I don’t— It makes my mind wander, and I think about things I can’t, not if I’m going to stay sane until this is all over.” She huffs a laugh. “You _ know _ I get nightmares. Even if I manage to fall asleep, I just wake up again. So.”

“Emotional distress?”

“I guess.” It’s dark under the desk. And it smells funky. “You really haven’t registered my stress levels going crazy?”

“I have.”

“Then, there ya go.” Sara makes a gesture. From this angle, she’s pretty sure SAM’s can’t see it, but he can feel it through her, probably, so it’s fine. It’s all perfectly fine. Especially sitting underneath this desk right now. “Two questions down, eighteen to go. Hit me.”

“I have no more questions.”

“Sure you do,” Sara says. “Listen, I know you’re doing your best to be unobtrusive, and I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s getting a bit frustrating. Just— talk. To me. I promise you won’t scare me off.” She adds, with just a hint of bitterness, “It’s not as if you could. It’s literally physically impossible.”

“Which is why I have attempted to keep you comfortable,” SAM says. She’d say he sounded somber, if he were human.

“I figured.” Sara draws a meaningless pattern in the dust on the floor. It sticks to her fingers. “But I’m saying that you don’t have to. It’s honestly more uncomfortable listening to you hedging and avoiding and skipping to the middle. And manipulating me.”

At that, there’s silence. Sara looks up, bending her neck at a bad angle to catch a glimpse of SAM’s avatar.

“I know you’re doing it, SAM. I can’t tell as it’s happening, but I know it must’ve happened at some point. You’re too clever to not have.”

“I have not,” SAM says, and it’s almost heated. “I would not. It would go against my basic programming.”

Sara blinks. “Huh.”

But she was so sure—

“Harming the pathfinder is in opposition to everything that I am. Which is why I implore you: go to sleep.”

She’s so tired. Something has gone soft in her chest, and she thinks, _ Why not at least try _.

“Okay,” she says quietly.

As she tries to clamber out from underneath the desk, she first almost sends herself sprawling when she pushes the chair away, and then she bangs her head on the underside of the table. It makes everything on top of it rattle ominously.

“I hate myself,” she sighs, rubbing at the spot as she picks herself up from the floor.

Walking over to the bed is less walking, more dragging her uncooperative body across the room. She flops down on the bed without even bothering to change out of her clothes. SAM dims the lights of his own volition.

“G’night, SAM.”

The blue light of SAM’s avatar goes out. “Sleep well, Sara."

* * *

Some indeterminate-but-clearly-not-enough amount of time later, Sara bolts awake, half on her feet before she even knows what’s happening.

As soon as her brain catches up, she sinks back onto the bed with a hand gripping her forehead, groaning. Her heart is pounding in her chest and she’s out of breath. Sweat clings to her exposed skin in a thin film. Every individual stitch of her day-clothes is rasping against her skin like a thousand tiny knives.

Great. Super great.

“Awesome,” she says.

“Are you well?” SAM asks. His avatar winks into existence over on the desk.

“Nightmare.” Sara squeezes her eyes shut and pinches the bridge of her nose, begging her heart to calm down. It wasn’t real. She’s awake now. Fuck off. “Another nightmare.”

She can’t even remember what it was about.

“I can see why sleeping is an unpleasant experience.”

“Can it be my turn to ask questions?” She doesn’t wait for a reply. “How much can you tell about… my general state of being, without asking?”

She presses the soles of her feet hard against the floor. In a minute, she’ll get up and pace a loop around the room. That usually helps. But at the moment, she trusts her knees about as far as she can throw them.

“Through your implant, I have access to your nervous system, circulation, endocrine function, and exteroceptive senses. I can monitor brain activity and other functions as well.”

“So, a lot.” Sara blinks her eyes open. It takes a bit for the room to come back into focus. “But you still decided to ask?”

“Based on previous experience,” SAM says, “initiating a conversation is the most efficient way to calm you down.”

Sara mulls that over for a bit. Her fingers clench around the edge of the mattress. The hum of the ship filters back in, past the roaring of blood in her ears.

It’s true, she supposes. She imagines someone else, like Liam, chatting with her now, but something in her recoils at the thought. It’s okay when it’s SAM, though. And that’s where tonight’s sleep-deprived contemplations will stop dead.

“Building a predictive model of me, are we?” she asks instead.

“I believe you would call it, ‘getting to know you.’”

Sara snorts. “Yeah, well, I don’t have the memory or the processing power or the mathematical capabilities to do anything even remotely similar to what you can. Us organics do this annoying thing called ‘getting caught up in the moment.’”

The darkness of the room feels like it’s suffocating her.

“That is two questions,” SAM says. “You have eighteen more.”

The lights turn on. Sara rubs at her eyes. They dim slightly, to a level that doesn’t make her eyes sting. “Thanks SAM.”

He lets it pass without comment.

She thinks for a moment, then decides, fuck it, she’s sleep-deprived enough to ask. “What’s your opinion of me? Are you…” She scuffs the end of her foot against the floor. “Okay with this? With being joined with me?”

“That was three questions,” SAM observes.

“You said I had eighteen,” Sara says, with a boldness she doesn’t really feel. “Answer ‘em.”

This is such a silly game. But he’s playing along, so maybe it’s not that silly. Or maybe things are allowed to be silly, sometimes. Maybe, sometimes, they need to be. Right now, they do, at least, because it feels vaguely normal. Silly Sara and her games.

“My purpose is to aid a Pathfinder in their work,” SAM says. “My design is reliant upon an organic partner. As such, there is nothing disagreeable about the current situation.”

That’s what she gets for trying to pry a personal opinion out of an AI, she supposes. But it wasn’t supposed to hurt. Or maybe it was? Is she in that kind of mood?

“You didn’t answer my first question,” she says, pulling her feet up from the floor and folding them sideways on the bed. “What’s—and this doesn’t count against my total because I am repeating myself, just so we’re clear—what’s notable about me? How do I hold up against dear old Dad?”

Yup. Definitely supposed to hurt.

“You are… different from Alec,” SAM says diplomatically. “But there are similarities.”

“Like?”

“Your curiosity. Your drive to explore. Your stubbornness.”

Sara snorts.

“Your determination during hardship,” SAM adds. That makes her go quiet.

She swallows. Fuck. She misses him. Despite everything, she misses him.

It’s not fair.

“Thirteen questions remaining.” SAM’s router whirrs softly. “I have distressed you.”

“Did that to myself,” Sara replies and presses a sleeve to her eye. “Not your fault. Thanks for the compliment.”

“You’re welcome, Sara.”

Sara sucks in a deep breath, holding it for a moment. She will not cry. She won’t. “What time is it?”

“The Tempest’s day cycle begins in two hours.”

That’s basically morning. It’s socially acceptable to ‘wake up’ now, right? Early bird gets the worm? The really, really early bird probably gets the gold. She could go for a medal. Some sort of acknowledgement other than more reports to fill out would be nice.

“If I may,” SAM says. “It is generally considered beneficial to cry during moments of intense emotion.”

Sara hiccups a laugh. The tears are rolling down her cheeks in little trickles now, thick and salty-sweet. She’s trying, but she can’t stop them. Never could. “I know. It just makes a mess, and…”

It’s stupid. She knows it is. But she’s the Pathfinder.

“Heroes don’t cry,” she whispers thickly. “I’m supposed to be one.” She sniffs, aims for levity. “I’m going the ‘Fake it ‘til you make it’-route."

“For what it’s worth, we are alone,” SAM points out.

A sob pushes its way out of Sara’s mouth. “Oh,” she says, and starts crying harder.

Her shoulders shake. Tears drip down on the sheets, drop after drop striking the fabric. She can tell her face is already a mess, hands clenching on top of her thighs.

Sara likes questions. But she wants an answer to this one: Why? Why her? Why now?

Why _ them _? Haven’t the Ryders already suffered enough?

Just. Why.

“I cannot answer that.”

“Oops,” Sara mumbles, and clumsily swipes the back of her hand over her face. “Didn’t mean for you to hear that.”

“I apologise.”

“Please stop apologizing,” Sara says. Her voice is so hoarse she can only just barely tell what she’s saying. “It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”

The majority of the fuck-ups are hers, and the rest belong to the conga line of supposedly competent adults she’s surrounded by. There’s enough guilt to go around without SAM making up some of his own.

“Noted.”

Another sob makes its way up Sara’s spine, out her mouth. She’d forgotten how crying is a full-body experience. It’s easy to forget anything but the tears themselves, because they’d make such a romantic image in isolation. In reality, there’s the snot to deal with. God, how she hates the snot.

“Worst involuntary reaction to distress ever,” she mutters.

“I have limited experience with non-human expressions of emotion,” SAM says, “but I believe there are worse.”

“God,” Sara says, breath hiccuping a little, “don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“I concur.”

Sara dries her eyes with a sleeve. It rasps against her cheek, just this side of painful. “Imagine if we just straight up died,” she says, with something that approaches humour. “Like, our brains couldn’t handle the stress and we just straight up died on the spot.”

“That would be inconvenient.”

“Like hell. I’d never get anything done.” Sara scoots forward on the bed, touching the soles of her feet to cold floor. She needs to clean up. There are tissues on the desk. She just has to make it across the room.

With a sigh, she pushes herself up on her feet. She’s given up on squashing the instinctive reaction, so it feels like SAM’s avatar watches her as she wipes her face, throwing the sticky tissues into the trash can one by one. When she’s done, she leans her forehead against one of the shelves on the wall above the desk. It’s cold. Everything on a spaceship is always cold.

“Thank you,” she says hoarsely. “Thank you, SAM.”

“Thank you, Sara,” SAM tells her.

A small smile touches her lips.

**Author's Note:**

> if you're here because you author-subbed me after one of my dw fics: thank you, you're a superb human being. actually, if you're here at all, you're pretty cool; this fandom died like two and a half years ago. i and a bunch of sara x jaal shippers are the only ones left :(
> 
> you know the drill! if you enjoyed, please drop a kudos or a comment. if you don't know what to say, please write BANANA in all caps, and i will take that as 'oh my god this was perfect have my babies.' but, uh, please, do _not_ write that. 'til next time!


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